Adam Lubinsky

This interview with Adam Lubinsky took place on September 1, 2021 via Zoom. Adam is an urban planner and principal at WXY Studio in NYC and frequently works with school districts focusing on school integration and building utilization issues. In this fifth interview with the Education Narratives Project, Adam talked about his family's summer, including a trip to Niagara Falls, and reflected on the ways in which their COVID-19 protocols have been more and less strict through different phases of the pandemic, requiring almost constant calibrations and re-calibrations about everyday decisions. His daughters are very excited to be going back to school in person this fall but pre-vaccination, there were periods of real anxiety for his older (teenage) daughter and some challenges as a family of four navigating their different levels of risk tolerance throughout the pandemic. Adam talked about how their home will be different without everyone learning and working there every day. He described the upcoming completion of renovations to a new office space, including ways that the design was influenced by COVID and, in preparation for that, plans-in-progress for the first in-person gathering of their team on September 13, exactly 18 months to the day since closing their office due to COVID. He also previewed upcoming work projects with school districts, including a new project in Philadelphia on the physical plant of that school district and work with several NYC districts on school integration.